Whatmore Family History

At the end of the Napoleonic Wars life was hard in the countryside. The wages of agricultural labourers were fixed and the price of everything was soaring. Many people were forced to look for work elsewhere and for those living in south Shropshire -  Birmingham and the Black Country offered the chance of a better life.

This is the story of  James Whatmore born 1792  and his descendants in Birmingham. James was the ancestor of Geoffrey Whatmore – our family historian, and this post is a shortened version of his story of his ancestors in ‘Wat’s Brother in Law’. I am most grateful  to Geoffrey Whatmore for his permission to reproduce this story here.

Further details of ‘Wat’s Brother in Law’ (CD ROM) can be found at this link:

http://www.genfair.co.uk/supplier.php?sid=115

 The pictures of the Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham in this post are from Wikopaedia and are reproduced here under the terms of the site licence which can be viewed at this link : http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ 

James Whatmore was baptised at Cleobury North in Shropshire in 1792, the son of William Watmore and his wife Sarah Pheasey. William Watmore, born in 1768, was the great grand son of James Watmore born 1697, who was the first leaseholder of Detton Mill in the parish of Neen Savage. (See earlier posts on Detton Mill).

It must have been about 1817, or a year or two earlier, that  James Whatmore from Cleobury North threw off the yoke of the land and tramped away to a new life in the towns. He may have stayed a while in the  pleasant village of Harbourne which was on the direct route from the Clees to Birmingham and a connection remained between the Birmingham family and the village for the next two or three generations, or he may  have broken his journey at Yardley, for it was there in 1817 that he married Sarah Canning, a girl a little older than himself, who was born some miles away in the village of Balsall, near Kenilworth.

By the 1820s James and Sarah Whatmore were living at Hockley in the central parish of St. Philip’s. To the south and west lay open country; Bordesley still possessed a green and Hockley was on the edge of the countryside.

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The Chamberlain clock     Copyright: Oosoom 

James and Sarah named  their first child William after his grandfather and he was baptised in St. Philip’s Church, Birmingham, (not yet a cathedral) on 19 September 1821. A second son, James, was baptised in the same church on 1 July two years later, to be followed by Henry on 5 April 1825, and by two daughters, Sarah and Emma, born in 1827 and 1830 respectively. 

The fast growing population of the town needed milk, and before the arrival of the railways most of it was produced locally. There was plenty of grazing land left in Hockley, and as the fields disappeared some cows were kept in back gardens and even in  cellars. A cow or two yielded enough milk in a day to provide a living for the milkman, especially if the milk were a little watered. So James became a milkman, and at the end of his life he was still tending cows in the midst of the city. The milk  was not delivered by horse and cart. The heavy churn was pushed from street to street in a hand cart, and the milkman cried for customers who came out with jugs and basins to be filled from a tin measure.  In 1841 James was trading from a shop at 23 Parade, Hockley.

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The Thomas Fattorini Factory     Copyright: Erebus 555

It must have been a large house, certainly a crowded one, for in addition to his own family James accommodated a lodger and two other children. In need of more space, James moved to 10 Camden Street.  Here he lived for eleven years or more until his death in 1862. In the 1840s in Birmingham the services now taken for granted were inadequate or altogether absent – piped water, sanitation, hospitals, schools, housing, police – inadequate everything, and the death rate was worse than that of the villagers left behind.

Little Emma, James’ daughter, may have perished, for no more is heard of her after her christening.  James’s son Henry seems to have had difficulty in settling down. Though the youngest of the brothers, at nineteen he was the first to marry (he misled the Registrar about his age), to Mary Ann Walker in the country church at Handsworth. On that special occasion he described himself as a silversmith, a fine start for a Hockley man, and he was a silversmith when he died twenty-seven years later, but in between there were many changes of occupation, and fluctuating fortunes. Within a year or two of his marriage he was helping his father as a milkman, then he became a polisher, probably in the jewellery trade. He was unemployed in 1857 and was working a year later as a jeweller’s polisher again. After his death, one of his sons remembered him as a milk seller and another as a jeweller. 

Hall Street, where Henry and Mary first lived after they married, was an older thoroughfare on the edge of the town, but it was soon surrounded by a surge of raw red brick. As a milkman he lived at 48 Tyndall Street, then back of 44 Carver Street; while he was out of a job Henry moved to back of 92 Carver Street, then returned to the court at the rear of number 44. By 1861 the family was at the back of 5 Morton Street, where Mary helped to support the family by taking in outwork making bead bracelets – a favourite job for the wives of poorer families. Henry died very suddenly in 1870 of a fit ‘by the visitation of God’ at only forty-five years of age.

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Caroline Street    Copyright:  Erebus 555

If we are to judge by worldly goods, it was James Whatmore Junior, the middle son, who fared best of all. Before he was fifteen he was apprenticed to John Powers, a butcher trading at 17 Ludgate Hill, but he soon planned to set up on his own. The opportunity came when his father moved to new premises in Camden Street and James took over the milk shop at 23 Parade and converted it to a butcher’s. In the busy and growing shopping centre he could hardly fail to succeed and he provided the Sunday roast for some and scrag ends for others of Hockley for the next thirty years.  

In 1846, James Junior married Eliza Buckle, a girl from Tewkesbury, at Harbourne parish church. The couple had no children and when James died in 1889 at 426 Monument Road he became the only one of his family to leave a will, bequeathing solely to Eliza the substantial sum of £1976. Nine years later Eliza also died at Monument Road, leaving £1533, later re-sworn at £1301. None of the Whatmores benefited under her will.    

More than the others, it was William, James’s eldest son and Geoffrey Whatmore’s great-grandfather, who set the standard for the mainstream of mid-Victorian Whatmores. With his home in Hockley, it was to be expected that William would enter the jewellery trade: he was apprenticed as a goldsmith, working from the house on the Parade in 1841. Like his brothers, however, he wanted to be his own man and was soon advertising in the directories as a ‘manufacturer of gold brooches. In spite of those gold brooches, jewellers in Birmingham did not for the most part deal in expensive jewellery. Theirs was the secondary market, meeting the rising middle-class demand for pendants, lockets and cameos to adorn bombazine bosoms, tie pins for Paisley cravats, and gold Alberts to glint across serge waistcoats. Not for them rubies and emeralds, but horn and mother of pearl, amber, jet and ivory set in gilt and silver plate. Geoffrey’s  father described how his father, son of William, received coloured stones from the beach at Aberystwyth, polished them and mounted them in rings and brooches, to be re-sold by a souvenir shop in the resort. It was not one trade but many, from the aristocrats who designed, through skilled stone cutters, engravers, chasers, gilders, setters and polishers, down to the child who packed the finished article in a beautifully made box, wrapped it in coloured paper and sealed it with wax.  

William Whatmore ran  his business from 251 Great King Street selling from the shop and making up in the workshop in the back. The back bedroom of the house in Monument Road where Geoffrey’s grandfather had his bench was an example of it (for he followed his father into the trade) and things did not seem to have changed much between the generations. Geoffrey remembers a slight grey figure in a white apron, the bench along the wall, the ‘peg’, the treadle polisher, the blow pipe, gas jet, and the soft leather skin beneath the bench to catch the precious gold droppings. The house at 251 Great King Street was the house of his parents-in-law, the Thorntons, and William and his family lived at No.88 down the road.

In 1846, the same year as his brother and in the same church at Harbourne, William had married Sarah, the daughter of James Thornton, a button burnisher, and his wife Rebecca, who was born Rebecca Heavens. Now both families lived in Great King Street and Sarah went home to her mother each time a baby was due. In her mother’s house Sarah gave birth to three much-loved daughters, Emily, Kate and Ada, before William James arrived to assure the Whatmore succession in 1856.  

As a jeweller, William must have been successful, at least in middle life, using the skills of his hands in the way of Birmingham craftsmen, ‘to make a guinea from a copper kettle’. Competition was intense and the children were used to run errands and deliver in the evening packets to customers who had ordered only that morning. But William contracted consumption and though he worked till his eyes grew sore and his body was shaken with coughing, he died at fifty-six of exhaustion due to phthisis. Emily was with him when he passed away at 33 Victoria Buildings, New Spring Street. His wife Sarah died in 1905 in Lench’s Trust Almshouses in Ravenhurst Street.  

It was to William Whatmore in all probability that the family owed their Nonconformity and their love of music. William’s son, William James (Will) was captivated by the thread of melody brightening the dingy streets of his birth, and music became the mainspring of his life. Though he was apprenticed as a jeweller (at Alldays in Warstone Lane), Will aimed to earn at least a part of his living from his musical talent. As a cautious young man, he kept two strings to his bow, combining professional musicianship with the craft of jewellery to keep body and soul together when the pupils were slow in paying. At twenty-two his greatest desire was to own a piano and he mortgaged his income for months ahead to buy one, a lovely rosewood and fluted velvet instrument.  

William James Whatmore became resident organist at the Baptist Church Highgate and then at Harbourne Wesleyan Church. The week was taken up with pupils for the violin and the piano at the front of the house, with the back bedroom devoted to making up jewellery between lessons. Before machinery killed it, the business enjoyed a further run of prosperity  with the mounting of medals and badges during the First World War.  William James Whatmore’s  father had died and Will was living at home with his mother when his life was brightened beyond belief by the appearance of Mary Higgs, a girl half Irish whose large family had moved from London to 135 Moseley Street, where they kept an upholstery business. These two did their courting in Sutton Park, not far on the tram from Aston, and Will married in 1881 from Emily’s
house in New Spring Street. (Mary was living at 202 Victoria Road).  

Will’s trade as a jeweller made in necessary for him to live in Hockley and they never moved far from its familiar pavements: they rented first a house in Frederick Street, then moved to 45 Hockley Hill, followed by long residence in an early Victorian house at 6 Monument Road.  William James and Mary Whatmore had more than their share of bereavements. Their first son, William Roe, a Higgs family name, died at five years of age. Kathleen Mary, their daughter, was a talented gentle girl in whom they took great pride as a teacher. She married Will Aston, a Baptist minister, and went to live in a chill granite house in Spennymoor, County Durham. She died of consumption within two years of her wedding and her baby, nursed after her mother’s death by Mary, her grandmother, scarcely reached a full year of life. Will Whatmore died in his sleep in 1926. His greatest gift to his son Reginald Whatmore, Geoffrey’s father, was to pass on his love of music, which sustained him and even seemed to grow stronger when there was little else left at the end of his life.

Most of these Whatmores lie together now in a leafy corner of Witton Cemetery.